Routing Anonymous callers doesn't work - but the answer was easy

Hi, So this did work a while back but somehow got killed off. This PBX is used for a business and my home so we get callers to do with both. We needed a block unknown numbers because of a specific caller being abusive. So I wanted to create a block to unknown numbers but do so using an IVR that says “Sorry but we cannot route unknown numbers, please now type in your account number which can be found on the bottom of any mail from us”.

And it did work, but not any longer and no matter what I tried the PBX wasn’t taking any notice. Looking through old posts here I hadn’t see the answer, But, there it was buried amongst lots of code-n-comments and off topic questions like why?

Without my knowledge the UK SIP trunk provider had changed anonymous to unavailable and just as that post said look in CDR reports and mine said “anonymous” followed by unavailable in <> brackets.

So in my inbound route I put just the text between the <> unavailable and it worked, I guess the “anonymous” stole the anonymity of unavailable from my prying eyes.

My hope, this post will help someone like me save themselves a lot of messing about trying to figure it out.

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